Nuclear familly

When Billie Holiday promised, “the difficult I’ll do right now, the impossible will take a little while,” she admitted that she was “crazy in love.” But that lyric might well serve as the anthem of the gay rights movement, which has achieved, more swiftly than any other individual rights movement in history, not merely the impossible, but the unthinkable. Those who have fought for what might be called the privileges of gay romance—the rights to marry and to have intimate sexual relations with the partner of one’s choosing, regardless of gender—were called crazy, and worse, by many. But they have proven not foolish romantics, but visionaries.

                                             sued = poursuivre en justice

When Ninia Baehr and Genora Dancel sued the state of Hawaii for the right to marry in 1991, no state, indeed no country, recognized the right of same-sex couples to marry. Gay rights groups at the time opposed the filing, worried that it would create bad law and/or spark anti-gay resentment. Most of the American public, it is safe to say, had hardly considered the issue, precisely because it was unthinkable. At the time, 75 percent of Americans thought gay sexual relations were morally wrong, and only 29 percent thought gays and lesbians should be permitted to adopt children. When, in the early 1980s, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors became the first city council in the country to recognize domestic partnerships, Mayor Dianne Feinstein vetoed the ordinance.

                                                the issue = problem

Today, two thirds of Americans, including Rush Limbaugh, support civil unions for same-sex couples; nine states and the District of Columbia have recognized gay marriage; and nine more have recognized same-sex civil unions or domestic partnerships with all or most of the benefits associated with marriage. Polls suggest that this progress will continue. A nationwide poll this year by the Public Religion Research Institute found that 62 percent of people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine favor gay marriage, while only 31 percent of those sixty-five and over do so.

But Klarman, one of the country's leading legal historians, remains skeptical of the utility of litigation to achieve this result.                                                     Klarman reserves his harshest criticism for Goodridge v. Departement of Public Health, in which the Massachusetts Supreme Court in 2004 became the first state supreme court to require, as a state constitutional matter, the recognition of same-ex marriage. That decision sparked a nationwide response. Within five years, twenty-five states had enacted constitutional amendments banning gay marriage. (Before Goodridge, only three states had done so.) In all of these states, of course, gay marriage was already not recognized, but inscribing that ban into the state's constitution makes it much more difficult to change.

Even if the Goodridge decision galvanized gay marriage opponents and united the Republicans in the short term, as Klarman argues, those same effects may hurt the Republicans in the medium to long term. Because young people overwhelmingly favor recognition of gay marriage, opposition to its recognition is likely to make the Republican Party less attractive to new voters. President Obama's explicit endorsement of gay marriage seems to have had no discernible backlash in this year's election, as young voters again favored Obama by a large margin.

In the years since Goodridge alone, the pace of change has been extraordinary. In 2003-4, Americans opposed gay marriage by roughly two to one. In the summer of 2010, for the first time ever, a national poll showed a majority of Americans supporting gay marriage.

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Quand Billie Holiday a promis, "le difficile je ferai tout de suite, l'impossible prendra un peu de temps," elle a admis qu'elle était "folle amoureuse." Mais que lyrique pourrait bien servir de l'hymne du mouvement de droits des homosexuels, qui a réalisé, plus vite qu'un autre mouvement de droits individuel dans l'histoire, non simplement l'impossible, mais l'impensable. Ceux qui ont battu pour ce ce qui pourrait être appelé les privilèges de roman(d'idylle) homosexuel - les droits d'épouser et avoir des rapports sexuels intimes avec le partenaire de son choix, indépendamment du genre - ont été appelés fous et plus mauvais, par beaucoup. Mais ils ont prouvé pas des romantiques idiots, mais des visionnaires.

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